Enter your email to subscribe:

The Supreme Court released some opinions and orders this morning. Hoiwever, no decision yet in Mayorkas v. Cuellar de Osorio, the last case argued in December 2013 that has not yet been decided. It is likely to be the only merits decision in an immigration case by the Supreme Court in the 2013 Term. The Court wil next release orders and opinions on Monday, June 9.

Natives of El Salvador, Rosalina Cuellar de Osorio and her family applied and waited seven years for visas that would allow them to join Rosalina’s mother – a U.S. citizen — in the United States. Notified that they were next in line, the family also learned that the applicant’s son, who had turned twenty-one while the application was pending and thus was no longer a “child” as defined by the immigration laws, would not be issued a visa. That result was consistent with the Board of Immigration Appeals’s interpretation of the statute.

As amended by the Child Status Protection Act (2002), the Immigration and Nationality Act has rules for determining whether children who “age out” can obtain immigrant visas as derivative beneficiaries of eligible family members. The question before the Court in this case is whether the statutory provisions allowing the issuance of visas to “aged out” children apply to all family immigrant visa categories or, as the BIA ruled, only some of them.